


He Was Supposed to Be An Angel

by IoanNemos



Series: Start Here [1]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Language, Nate's kinda messed up, Other, References to Sex, Sully and Sam feel guilty about this, rated for:, references to violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 09:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6951439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IoanNemos/pseuds/IoanNemos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When is a monster not a monster? / Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled."<br/>Caitlyn Siehl, "Start Here"</p><p>Sully and Sam reflect on Nate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Victor Sullivan

You found him when he was fifteen and overnight he carved out a place in your life that it took him years to relax into. He was a cypher with no key, a house full of locked doors and broken windows. He wandered with you, job to job, across the continent, trailing behind like the glowing tail of a comet. He was full of energy and bullshit, a smart remark always hovering behind his teeth. He wielded sarcasm like a shield and hated that he loved it when you called him ‘kid.’

He would vanish in the night sometimes and you wouldn’t stay up, but you didn’t sleep either. The next morning you wouldn’t say too much about it, because he was like a wild animal and you didn’t want him to think he was trapped.

Sometimes you dared to ask, dared to imply, tried to get past his too-thick skin. Most of the time, you got bared teeth in reply.

 

It took him six months to tell you he had a brother, and six minutes to send your heart into overdrive as phrases like “been a real blast” and “actually learned a lot” and “he’s out next week” and “hitchhike back” tumbled off his tongue effortlessly.

“You’re not hitchhiking,” you said, because you wanted to say “You’re not leaving like this,” and his painless acquiesce dripped into you like a warm rain because if he’d had a single second thought he would have said it.

 

He already knew about sex, driving, drinking, and swearing. The only thing left for you to teach him about being a man was how to kill.

 

You didn’t put the gun in his hand but you taught him how to shoot it. You bought him one for a job (for his birthday) and when you took him shopping for a proper way to carry it you were the one who found the leather underarm holster. “It’ll last for years,” you said, and helped him try it on. It hung a little loose on his growing frame (all lean muscle), and while you adjusted the straps you said, “You’re still growing. You’ll grow into it.”

He looked at himself in the mirror, quickdrew an imaginary gun, and shot his reflection in the head. He glanced at you, wanting your approval. “How’s it look?”

Your heart turned to stone, so you covered your mouth. “Looks good,” you said, and when he grinned, you shivered to your foundations.

 

By turns he’s a bloodhound and a raven, focused on one thing or distracted by anything. It didn’t occur to you until it was too late that he could have been a boy.

Maybe it was too late before you even met him. (That’s how you try to sleep at night.)

 

When your phone rings in the middle of the night, somehow you know it’s bad news. The overloud trilling reverberates in your not-quite-hangover and pulls you out of the woman’s arms like a black hole, silence howling in the back of your mind. “Yeah?”

“Victor Sullivan?” The voice is unfamiliar and pleasantly accented, feminine and calming. Your heart crawls into your throat.

“Yeah, what?”

“Just a moment, please.” There’s the sound of the phone being shifted between hands, and you just hear the calm voice say, “Keep it brief, sir: you need your rest.” Your heart restarts somewhere south of your voicebox, and you’re just breathing again when you hear his voice.

“Sully?”

And then your heart slams to a halt, because he has never sounded so young.

 

You carry him until he squirms out of your grasp. The cast isn’t even off his arm.

He picks up his shattered pieces on his own, and you let him because the first time you tried to shape him he emerged from the burning building of his teenage years with a gun in one hand and his heart in the other.

 

You taught him how to protect himself with a firearm, with words, with honed quick-thinking and a winning smile. You couldn’t teach him to be less stubborn, to let go of things, or to stop believing in people.

 

Later, you see him in his element: decoding ancient Mayan, writing laboriously with his non-dominant non-broken hand, bloodstained teeth flashing as words pour out of him, as he explains his revelation like he should have seen it sooner.

Here he is, you think with a flash of insight. If you find what you’re looking for, he’ll merrily steal it, then sell it so he can make rent for a while. If those thugs catch up with you and his luck runs out, there won’t be even thirty years on his gravestone. If you don’t find it, he’ll be in a low mood that nothing can shake, gnawing at his failure until it’s soft enough to swallow whole, until something new shows up, something shining like hope or fool’s gold.

Here he is, you think with a sick feeling in your stomach. Here is what he became under your tutelage, with your guidance. He has an apartment somewhere and enough natural charm to keep from being lonely, so long as he doesn’t stay long enough to miss her. His hobbies are his job, his friends are his black market contacts, his life is a sine wave sweeping between mountain tops and sea caves. He has spent more time in the past than the present and spends so very little time in his future.

“Sully, are you listening?” he demands, book open in his hands, lines of pain around his eyes. Neither of you have slept in twenty-four hours, and once you climb back out of here, you’re going to have to force him to drink the last bottle of water. You’ll likely be shot at, because that’s what always happens, and he’ll whoop and cheer with adrenaline when you escape by a thread. This will all be normal.

“Yeah, kid,” you say, because you can’t say, “What the fuck have I done?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not 100% sure why this ended up in second person, because I never write in second person, but here we are.


	2. Samuel Drake

He inherited Mom’s stubbornness, her artistic talent, her flashes of intuition, her nose. He got his eyes from Dad, his terrible on-the-spot lies, his decently-acted carelessness when given enough time to plan, the way he planted his hands on his hips.

I taught him how to drive a motorcycle and hotwire a car, how to swear, how to hang off the edge of a building by his fingertips and not panic. I taught him how to shave, how to drink, how to fight, how to talk up girls and what to do afterwards.

His bleeding heart was all his own.

 

He picked up his new passport and stared at it for a long moment before saying, “Nathan Drake.” He shivered, and looked at me with a strange gleam in his eye.

“How’s it feel?” I asked, slapping his shoulder.

“It feels… weird,” he said, adding quickly, “but great.”

I never heard him misspeak. Whenever he introduced himself, Nathan Drake rolled off his tongue like it was meant to be there. Levi and Cassandra Morgan faded away until we could both almost pretend they didn’t exist.

 

I couldn’t pretend the scars didn’t exist, though. I could see whenever the afterimages of Dad’s selfishness floated through Nathan’s head, the helpless anger of abandonment rising again, and I could see the way he tried to guard against it. I could see the formless guilt bubble up around Mother’s Day and the transparent way he tried to hide it, like a little kid standing in front of the broken vase.

What I didn’t see was the myriad ways I did the same thing.

 

I taught him that I was hard. Under his armor, he decided to be soft.

I taught him to fight. When pushed into it, he decided to win.

Victor taught him to shoot. When he couldn’t talk his way out of it, he decided to take no prisoners.

 

For the first twelve hours out of the prison, I half-wrote at least three dozen letters to Nathan in my head. Rafe showed me what he had, his maps and letters and theories, and my mind was in New Orleans, though I didn’t know it at the time.

For the next two years, I kept Nathan out of my head, as if Rafe could read my mind and know what I was planning.

I spent the plane ride to Louisiana perfecting the story. I had a few ideas in mind in case he’d heard about Alcázar.

I didn’t need any of them. He hadn’t, and he still had a bleeding heart.

I really didn’t know how to feel about that.

 

I remember, in sharp detail, my mother saying, “Samuel, take care of Nathan.”

I don’t remember when she said it, or where, or why. But I can still see her face.

She was making an expression I saw Nathan make a lot: the distracted face of someone interrupted in the midst of reading, their eyes still tracing words even once they’re no longer looking at the page, on the verge of irritation at being pulled out of the river of knowledge they were swimming in.

I don’t remember if Nathan was crying, or needed something. I don’t know how old he was, how old I was. But I hear her voice in the back of my head every day.

“Samuel, take care of Nathan.”

 

When I stepped outside the prison gates, I didn’t see Nathan right away, and the worry that had been simmering the year I was behind bars began to boil. Every bad scenario was flashing through my mind when the guy in the Hawaiian shirt smoking a foul cigar stepped away from his old, battered coupe. The door flew open and my baby brother half-exploded out.

Seeing Nathan come out of a beat-up car apparently belonging to a forty-something guy with an oral fixation and terrible mustache… As I crossed the road I connected a few dots and as the creep inhaled to say something I connected my fist with his face.

Nathan’s horrified, “Sam, what the hell?!” made me pause, and reconsider beating a guy to death right in front of a prison. Nathan grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the guy, who was still recovering from my sucker punch. “What the hell’s wrong with you?! That’s Sully, he saved my life!”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah!” Nathan looked bewildered, young. Heart still on his sleeve. “He’s been… kinda taking care of me while you were gone. He saved me when I-- Oh!” He pulled a leather cord out from under his shirt. “I did it, Sam! I got the ring!”

I told myself it was the fresh air giving me a headache.

 

I thought people were supposed to be stronger where they healed. I came back fifteen years late with the same tired lies and he fell apart in my hands right along the same old lines.

 

After their confrontation, he didn’t bring up either Elena or Sully. It felt like a death hanging over us, and as I watched him inhale, remember, crush down the pain, and exhale without saying anything, I wondered if that was why he’d never brought me up with her.

He had always refused to admit he felt things so strongly. Probably came from trying to mimic my devil-may-care attitude.

Later, when he pushed me away and choked out, “I left my life for you!”, I wondered how poetic he meant that.

And not five minutes later he tried to get between me and Rafe anyway. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even think about it.

 

Even without the smoke I could barely breathe, and every time he cried out it felt like a physical blow. He kept getting up, though. He just kept getting up. And when he got up for the last time, giving Rafe’s burial pile barely a look, all I could hear was Mom’s voice.

“Samuel, take care of Nathan.”

He inherited Mom’s stubbornness. His luck is all his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Father Drake's name is never given in canon, but Levi seemed to fit.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Brothers Drake](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7068025) by [Thalius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thalius/pseuds/Thalius)




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